


chasing spring

by blue-plums (arabesque05)



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-29
Updated: 2015-05-27
Packaged: 2019-09-16 02:38:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16945404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arabesque05/pseuds/blue-plums
Summary: waiting hurts, and may take more than a season





	1. Chapter 1

 

> _but when the cold stays, how violent is the urge to say_  
>  _to the snow, you are frozen as the gate of my soul_

Maybe, like this: academy records are a matter of public record, and Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura graduated at the top of their genin class. It’s not difficult to imagine what they had been like -- a nerd couple, for whom academic rivalry became mutual admiration became romantic interest; study dates in libraries; late nights spent revising for exams; laughing at obscure chakra puns. Love could grow from such things. Her father wore thick round glasses, and her mother wore her hair in unfashionable braids, and neither of them were good looking or popular, but they spoke well together and --

Bullshit, admits Sarada. It couldn’t have gone like that. Her mother’s maybe the most gorgeous woman in Konoha. Top five, at least. Sarada might be biased, but even Kaka- _jiji_ says so, and he’s something of a subject matter expert.

(At home, there is a picture of her father: young, tall, impossibly handsome. A man who looks like that could not have been unpopular. A man with such self-assured confidence, who carried himself so straight and held his head so high -- a man like that would not have peaked at twelve, would not have found himself a perpetual chuunin or resigned himself to a life of B-rank missions and steady paychecks, never wandering more than fifty kilometers beyond the village walls.

Sarada sometimes daydreams about having such a father: how embarrassing it must be. Exactly the type to tell terrible dad jokes too, all the time, all the time, greeting her every afternoon when she came home from school with some obscure chakra pun, calling her “Sa-chan” as if she were still five-years-old. How embarrassing it must be, surely...

No. No, instead, Sarada has an old photograph behind cold glass, of a dark-eyed young man who looks like he could eat the world entire, bleeding and raw.)

* * *

Chouchou has the most god-awful sense of direction, it almost verges on amazing.

“Fuck you, Uchiha,” says Chouchou. Still, she always pairs up with Sarada when they have training outside the walls. Sarada’s spatial visualization is so good that, really, she should become a cartographer instead of a shinobi.

“You never got lost?” says Chouchou skeptically.

“Not since I was two,” says Sarada.

“Is that right?” says Chouchou sarcastically. “And that was just temporary, wasn’t it? You found your way again eventually. Something in your nose just sniffs out north.”

“No,” says Sarada. “There’s nothing in my nose.”

Chouchou punches Sarada in the arm, more affectionate than anything. She’s smiling when she says, “That doesn’t make it better, you freak.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t find my way back, either,” says Sarada. “It was outside the walls. It got dark and I couldn’t find gramps. I sat there and bawled my eyes out.”

Chouchou slings an arm around Sarada’s shoulder. “You’re a real girl, after all,” she says, sounding proud. “Congrats. Anmitsu’s my treat today.”

* * *

Sarada doesn’t remember how she got lost: only how cold that night had been, and how white her mother’s face was, and how, when Sarada opened their front door, her mother cried, “Sa-chan!” like her heart was breaking.

Someone had brought Sarada home -- certainly she had not found her own way. Gramps, probably (-– but the smell was different: sharper somehow, like cold winter mornings; and the voice had been different too, telling her, “There now. It’s all right,” quiet and dark, like the settling dusk).


	2. Chapter 2

> _but look!_   
>  _on the other side of the brook (and here the lies start)_   
>  _a yellow flower nods in your direction_

On the banks of the Naga river, a little past the shrine, there is an old hickory tree. Sarada goes there sometimes after school. When she was seven, a pair of sparrowhawks made a nest in the high branches; Sarada climbed the tree everyday to check on the eggs. These days, she goes for the quiet, far removed from the bustle of the village. She’s not quite sure who owns the land -- it must be private land, given its marked lack of real estate development -- but no crotchety old man ever appeared, waving his cane at her to get off his lawn; so Sarada considers it tacit permission. In point of fact, she has never seen anyone else there.

It is only ever her, and the hawks, and the man in the hawk mask.

* * *

When they were five, Sarada and Boruto gave each other ANBU tattoos, drawn in black marker on the right arm.  
  
“Now do my left!” said Boruto, turning to present his left bicep. “The Hyuuga clan symbol! So dad can suck it.”

Sarada drew a pig.

“Sarada-chaaaan,” complained Boruto, when she finished and allowed him to look.

Sarada capped the marker. Boruto’s mom was nice and and all, but Boruto’s dad was Sarada’s mom’s best friend. They went drinking together and Sarada’s mom punched him in the face like, all the time, and Boruto’s dad laughed about it, which basically meant that Boruto’s dad was an indestructible freak of nature.

“I bet your dad’s ANBU,” she said instead. Boruto pooh-pooh’d at that. Sarada continued, “Your dad’s going to be Hokage. Kaka- _jiji_ used to be ANBU, right?”

This seemed reasonable to Boruto. “Do you think that’s why Kaka- _jiji_ wears a mask all the time?”

“Maybe?” Sarada furrowed her brow. “Mom says it because he’s a pervert.”

“What’s a pervert?” asked Boruto.

Sarada didn’t know either.

“Probably like a leveled-up ANBU! Full-time masks!” declared Boruto. He jumped up and clenched a fist in determination. “I’m going to be one when I grow up then.”

“A pervert?” asked Sarada. It didn’t  _sound_  like a leveled-up ANBU.

“Why not? Better than  _chief administrative councilman_ ,” said Boruto, making a face like those words tasted bad. Sarada was mostly impressed he knew the full title. Everyone just called Boruto’s dad “chief”, except Sarada’s mom, who called him “Naruto” and “idiot” and, occasionally, “dead last.”

* * *

It isn’t as if Sarada hasn’t considered that her father might be ANBU, away on some decade long undercover mission, burying himself in duty to bring down a warlord or criminal kingpin. But it’s no comfort. Sarada is still short a father, and her mother is still short a husband; the reason might be good, but the outcome does not change.

* * *

When Sarada first met the man in the hawk mask: she slipped from a branch on the hickory tree and had time to think,  _oh shit -–_

–- and someone caught her, halfway down the tree. She was set down on the ground, and the scrapes on her elbows were patched up, and bits of twigs and leaves pulled out from her hair; as she stared at a man of unremarkable age, unremarkable height, unremarkable coloring. It might have been a woman, really. Except for a mask painted in the stylized design of a hawk, everything about him was so unremarkable that he might as well have not existed, for how much description Sarada could later put together.

Sarada thought for a moment. He was not wearing ANBU gear; in fact, she was not certain he was even real. “ _K_ _odama_ -san?” she ventured.

“No,” said the man in an unremarkable voice. “I am not the spirit of this tree.”

“Oh,” said Sarada. She stared at him, but the details kept slipping away. She didn’t quite know what she saw.

“Can you stand?”

Sarada stood. She had heard her mother ask the question often enough that Sarada added, “My legs are fine. They don’t hurt.”

“You will bruise tomorrow,” he predicted.

“That’s all right,” said Sarada. She glanced up at the tree. “ _Kodama-_ san,” she said.

“I am not,” he said, mild.

“Do those birds up there belong to you?”

“They’re sparrowhawks,” he told her. “They are not mine.”

“Is that what they are? We have those kind of birds around my house all the time; but I’ve never seen them nest before. Do you think they will still be here tomorrow?”

“The eggs have not hatched yet,” he answered.

“That’s right,” said Sarada.  _Good_ , she thought. She looked down at the scrapes on her arms -- they weren’t too bad, but mom would probably want her to stay off trees for today. It was getting to time to go home anyway. “Thank you for your help today,” she told the hawk mask, bowing the way her mother had taught her: polite but not overly so. Etiquette was a matter of degree, and her mother believed in moderation in all things.

“Not at all,” replied the other, and -- the first remarkable thing about him -- returned her bow with exquisite correctness.

* * *

He was not there the next day, when Sarada went back.


	3. Chapter 3

> _so much, then, for the habit of chasing spring_

Perhaps like this, instead: Sarada has seen her mother’s old bingo books, Uchiha Sasuke listed in them as S-class missing nin, all non-jounin ranks to flee on sight. 

No one talks to Sarada about her paternal grandparents, but she’s not an idiot. There are buildings in the west side of town, wall after wall painted with the Uchiha symbol. Yet, there is only one Uchiha name carved in the memorial stone. It is not difficult to piece these two things together: that her father’s family had in death not been honored by the village. 

Sarada’s mother is a physician, the foremost hospitalist in Konoha. Sarada’s father is a missing-nin, from a disgraced shinobi family. Twenty years ago, their roles might have been the same: her mother, bright and sensible and hard-working; her father, cold and uncooperative and dangerous. People write romances about that sort of thing -- good girls, bad boys, the redemptive power of love.

Sarada is too much a kunoichi to read romances as anything but cautionary tales. Romances deal with love as a war, two souls against the world; but hearts have no place on the battlefield, and war is mathematics more than anything else. Love alone is not enough to win. Perhaps her mother tried to save her father, too, when they were both young; but love is not a redemptive force. You cannot save a person who does not want to be saved. 

At the end of stories, there is a confession, a kiss, a wedding. They never write about the aftermath -- single mothers, fatherless daughters, ex-missing-nin so far home as to exist only in memory.

What use is a wedding, if there is no marriage?

* * *

Sometimes, when Sarada asks things like, “Did he wear glasses?” or “How tall was he?” or “Was he left-handed?” her mother bullshits some terrible lie about how she doesn’t know or doesn’t remember. Sarada has no idea what that’s about, why her mother won’t answer these questions.

Sometimes, though, her mother says things like, “Aren’t you getting tall! Like your father, I suppose,” or “Why so many tomatoes! You and your father, I swear–-!” or --

“Why don’t you wear a wedding ring?” Sarada asks at the hospital, sitting by her mother’s bed, peeling apples.

“What a pain,” replies her mother, sounding for a moment remarkably like Nara-kun’s father. Then, with a bright laugh inimitably her own, she says, “I work at a hospital, Sa-chan. Imagine how many times I’d have to take it off every day, just to wash my hands!”

Sarada stares at the long curl of apple peel hanging from her knife. Her mother seems in good health today. Sarada dares, “There aren’t any wedding pictures in the house, either.”

She cuts the apple into eight slices, puts them on a plate, and passes it to her mother. She thinks about the pictures in Boruto’s house; Boruto’s mother demure and lovely with her hair bound under a  _tsunokakushi_ , Boruto’s father stiff and uncomfortable in formal  _hakama_. Sarada has no such pictures in her house.

“Well,” says her mother, picking up an apple slice, “that’s because we didn’t have a wedding, exactly. We turned in the paperwork, and updated the family registry at the tower, you know, and then we went out for lunch. Okonomiyaki,” she remembers.

Sarada stares.

It seems too mundane -- paperwork, government office, lunch. “And then?” Sarada asks.

Her mother chews for a while, thinking. “Then I had work; and your father went home to unpack our moving boxes. He broke two flower vases -- not entirely on accident, I suspect.” She leans closer and says, in a somewhat conspiratorial tone, “They were from your great-aunt Yamato. Very ugly.”

“And then?” says Sarada.

Her mother shrugs. “We had dinner, I guess. Your father probably cooked -- you know how I am in the kitchen. And then we puttered around the house, like any other night.”

* * *

Okonomiyaki for lunch, unpacking moving boxes, ugly flower vases from a distant relative -- Sarada thinks about these things, and about  _missing-nin, s-class, flee on sight_. They are hard to reconcile. Love is not a redemptive force, and you cannot save a man if he does not want to be saved; but what about her father needed saving? A man who knows to accidentally break ugly wedding gifts -- there is nothing tragically lost about such a man. A man like that knows exactly what he is doing.

Sarada’s mother is a physician, and the foremost hospitalist in Konoha. They’ve never paid for a meal when they go out to eat; every cook and waitstaff has some friend or relative whose life Haruno Sakura saved. Sarada’s father is no longer listed in the bingo books; pardoned by Kaka- _jiji_ for “services rendered in aid of Konoha”, as vague and nondescriptive as anything ever said about Uchiha Sasuke. 

It is unfair to think of them as they used to be, unchanged from when they were academy students.

* * *

People outgrow all sorts of things: clothes, shoes, dreams, each other.

* * *

(“Maybe my parents are just divorced,” says Sarada, by the river. “Woke up one day and turned in divorce papers at the tower and went out for lunch and mom got custody of me. Dad lives in Wave or Mist or something. Nobody talks about him because it’s awkward for mom.”

“Maybe,” agrees the man in the hawk mask. “And then?”

“Then…” Sarada picks at the bark on the tree. “Then, even legally, dad’s not part of the family. Not in practice, not in law -- all I’ve got is blood, and what does that matter?”

“Does it?” asks the man in the hawk mask.

Sarada looks at him, though there is nothing really to focus on. Perhaps his hair is a little dark today, perhaps it is long. Sarada squints, but her eyes grow tired. She looks away. She says, “No. I guess it doesn’t. Family’s not decided by blood. I don’t know my father either way.”)


	4. Chapter 4

> _the brave, dumb oaf who’d rather swallow poison_   
>  _than praise its fancy bottle, endures the glacier_

Sarada lives near the edge of town, in a quiet residential neighborhood. There is a sparse gathering of trees in her backyard, mostly young elm saplings. It does not explain the bird population around her house: goshawks, sparrowhawks, harriers, kites, by the dozens.

They are not exactly the sort of adorable woodland creatures a girl dreams about befriending. Sometimes Sarada finds them mid-meal, beak bloody with the entrails of some field mouse or grass snake: they pause and look at her with bright, golden eyes; and then -- as if in recognition -- they return to their meal, unconcerned.

* * *

Chouchou goes with Sarada to the Hokage tower, saying something about how she’s always known that Sarada’s sexually drawn to old, dusty filing cabinets, that’s just how nerdy Sarada is; she probably dreams about marrying spreadsheets. Sarada swings a punch that Chouchou easily dodges -- but she’s grateful. Chouchou does the whole asshole routine well, but it’s concern that prompts her to accompany Sarada.

“But I don’t think we’ll find anything,” says Chouchou, after the desk clerk on duty leaves to fetch the Uchiha family registry. “ _I’ve_  never heard anything about your parents’ divorcing, and dad knows everything that happens in the village.” She taps her nose.

Chouchou’s father is on friendly terms with pretty much everyone in the village, it’s true: but there are secrets in secrets -- that is the nature of a hidden village, and no one, not even the Hokage, can know them all.

The clerk returns with a filing folder. “Do you want a copy of the registry?” he asks, as if prepared to go make Sarada one.

“No,” says Sarada. She has good visual memory; she won’t forget after reading something.

The clerk hands her a sheet of paper: the usual sort of government paperwork, neat grids that list address, head of household, dependents, birth dates. Both her parents are listed, and she is as well. Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Sakura, Uchiha Sarada, in unsentimental black ink.

“Seeeeee,” says Chouchou. “Nothing weird, right?”

“Do you…” Sarada returns the registry sheet to the clerk. “Do you have my parents’…marriage certificate?”

“Sure thing,” says the clerk, as he puts away the registry form. He looks through the filing folder for a minute, and pulls out another page.

It’s not much different from the family registry: marriage certificate, it says on top -- and then more neat grids to fill out: spouse one, spouse two; year, month, date; parents of the spouse; witnesses; signatures. Sarada stares at her mother’s familiar scrawl, the same as she uses when prescribing medications, and when paying bills, and on Sarada’s school forms. The other signature is -- her father’s handwriting, thinks Sarada. She has never seen it before.

There is something pleasing about the way his penstrokes flow into each other -- a sort of fluidity to his writing that reminds Sarada of the academy calligraphy teacher. The lines are dark: he had not hesitated when signing this form. Was that just his character, confident in all he did? Or was he eager to marry her mother, certain about their future happiness? Had they, wonders Sarada for the first time, had they been happy?

“Can I have a copy of this, please?” she asks the clerk, passing her fingers over her father’s name.

* * *

A few summers ago, the rainfall had been especially heavy: it had been a wet year. The fields all flooded, and the lizard population in Konoha boomed. They were everywhere, on walls, in gardens, even sneaking into the plumbing pipes. The Kobayashis up the street had to lizard-fumigate their house.

It was the first time Sarada felt grateful for the hawks in her backyard. Her house was free of lizards. Sometimes, when the weather was clear, she sat on the back porch and watched the plummeting dive of the birds when they spotted a prey. Occasionally, her mother sat with her.

“The visual acuity of hawks is ridiculous,” her mother murmured. “They have five times the photoreceptors humans have -- isn’t that crazy?”

Sarada eyed her mother askance. “You were  _such_  a nerd in school, weren’t you?” she said.

Her mother reached over and tugged on a lock of Sarada’s hair. “Brat,” she said, fondly. “I was  _super_  popular, what are you talking about? Do you know how many times the Hokage asked me out?”

“Liiieeees,” declared Sarada. “You never call him the Hokage, except when you’re showing off.”

“You got me,” admitted her mother, hooking an arm around Sarada’s shoulders and pulling her closer. “Well, it’s nothing to brag about -- he’s a dork, that guy. And I only ever had eyes for your dad.”

“And dad?” asked Sarada.

“Hmm,” said her mother, looking out over their backyard. In the sky, two hawks were circling. In the distance, there was a low rumble of thunder. “Dad had good eyes too,” she said, and smiled at Sarada, very bright. “Married me, didn’t he?”

Of course he did, Sarada wanted to say: who wouldn’t want to? Her mother was the best, smart and funny and warm. But some things were hard to put into words -- so she tucked herself closer to her mother’s side, and they watched the birds together.

“There are a lot of them,” said Sarada.

“Yes,” said her mother, quietly. After some a time, she said with a little wonder, “So many. As if…there were a thousand birds.”

* * *

When the eggs in the nest in the hickory tree hatched, Sarada was surprised by how  _ugly_  the chicks were. “But their parents are so handsome!” she protested in dismay.

“It takes some time,” said the man in the hawk mask, perched on a branch below Sarada’s. “They will grow.”

A horrible thought struck Sarada. “Are all babies like this? Was I really ugly when I was born?”

“Impossible,” assured the man in the hawk mask, in so dry a voice that Sarada suspected he was laughing at her.

She squinted at him dubiously. In reply, he reached up a hand and offered to help her down the tree. “Do you have homework today?”

“Yes,” sighed Sarada, and accepted his help down the tree. Her backpack was resting against the tree trunk -- she pulled out her books. It turned out the man in the hawk mask knew something of long division: she asked him what happened when the dividend ran out of digits; and how many times six went into eight-one. He was less well-versed in history -- it was quicker to refer to her textbook than to ask him about him the founding date of the village; he had it wrong anyway. 

The man in the hawk mask stayed in the lowest branch of the tree, back against the trunk. Once or twice, Sarada heard beating wings, and looked up to see a bird land to perch on the man’s forearm.

When she finished, Sarada put her books away. She asked him, “Are they yours, those birds?”

“Yes,” said the man in the hawk mask.

“Do you own a lot of birds?”

“Some,” said the man in the hawk mask.

He came down from the tree, and helped Sarada pull on her backpack. She looked up at him: she thought maybe he was tall. He blocked out the sun the way the hickory tree did.

“Will the chicks be handsome tomorrow?” she asked.

“Give them time,” he advised.

“Because mom read ‘The Ugly Duckling’ to me last week; and it’s not that I don’t like ugly birds, but what if they get made fun of by other birds?”

“What if?” agreed the man in the hawk mask.

Sarada thought about this. Sometimes Inojin called her ‘four-eyes’ and asked her what kind of Uchiha needed glasses; but then Chouchou would kick him in the shins, which dropped Inojin like a dead weight. S _ay that again_ , Chouchou would dare him; and Inojin would call her  _fatty_ , and she would kick him again; and Shikadai would have to slouch over, sighing bitterly, and knock them both over the head.

“It would be better if they had good friends,” said Sarada.

“Yes,” said the man in the hawk mask. Sarada looked at the mask, white porcelain and black ink. She could not see through the narrow eyes slits; but she thought maybe his eyes were dark, like her own. She thought maybe there was something familiar about his voice, like a long ago memory, like the settling dusk.

“ _Kodama-_ san,” she said, even though he was not. “I have to go home now or mom will worry; but I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, will you be a good friend for the chicks?”

He was still for some moments, head slightly tilted, considering her. At length, he said, "Yes.” And then, he said, “You have grown up well, child.”

“What does that mean?” she asked. She thought about his dry,  _Impossible_ , and was doubtful again. “Maybe I’m not as good-looking as mom -- I don’t have her eyes, after all -- but -–”

“No,” said the man in the hawk mask. He bent low, until the mask was level with her. “I like your eyes -- ” and the way his voice curled, she thought he might have been smiling. “ -- just as they are.”


	5. Chapter 5

> _waiting hurts, and may take more than a season_

Occasionally, Chouchou says things like, “Ugh, why do you even  _want_ a father, they’re so embarrassing!” This usually happens when Akimichi-san is standing on a public sidewalk, eating a flavor of potato chip that Chouchou finds deathly offensive. And this usually is also followed by a more thoughtful, “Well, I guess it’s different for you, huh?  _Your_  dad is a total hunk.”

“Eh?” says Sarada, flustered and red. “What? Ew.”

“Are you blind?” asks Chouchou heatedly. “He’s totally prime steak! Appreciate a good thing when you see it! God, I bet your dad would never eat seaweed flavored potato chips in public.”

Sarada tries to imagine her father eating potato chips at all. She cannot. The man in the photograph, with his dark-eyed hauteur and grimness of manner -- he does not seem like he could have ever eaten a potato chip in his life.

* * *

And yet: would he not have taken her mother on dates? Sat in a dark theater and shared a bucket of popcorn, getting grease on his fingertips, watching the sort of formulaic crime-thriller her mother loves. Gone for walks in the park, feeding ducks in the lake, sitting on benches to share a lunch bento. Talked in street corner coffee shops, lingering over pastry choices, adding cream to her mother’s coffee but no sugar. How did he take his coffee? What did they talk about? Did they hold hands on the walk back, and did he pause when they reached her mother’s front door, and did he think of nonsensical things to say, so as to put off the moment of departure, so as to stay another moment? How did they fall in love, her parents: the finest shinobi of their generation -- how did they fall in love? Slowly and softly, that they did not know until they were in the middle; or in a flash, thunderous, the ground trembling under their feet, that they realized it must have been love? 

(What changed, when Sarada was born? 

When he left, was it slowly and softly, that they did not know until it was only his shadow that lingered; or in a flash, thunderous, the door slamming shut behind him? 

How do people fall out of love?)

* * *

It isn’t as if Sarada is unaware of how unutterably  _strange_  the man in the hawk mask is: in the first place, what kind of a person keeps meeting with a prepubescent girl in some abandoned field? In the second, how strong he must be, to cast a genjutsu that never wavers and never pricks at Sarada’s eyes -- even Tsunade- _baachan_ ’s youthful transformation sometimes makes Sarada’s eyes itch, as if with spring pollen.

Sarada is somewhat suspicious by nature -- a trait probably not inherited from her mother. Strong as Konoha shinobi are, the man in the hawk mask would have no difficulty slipping past the wall guards: he could be a spy, or an assassin, or a madman, with free access to the bustling heart of the village. Sarada has no delusions that she could stop him by force -- but at the very least, as a loyal citizen, she should ask, “Who are you?” and “Where are you from?” and “What are you doing in Konoha?”

Sarada does not ask these questions. 

Instead, she asks, “How do birds rotate their pinion feathers?” and “How should I approximate the square root of 10.5?” and “Do you think these hickory nuts are edible?”

Perhaps in turn, the man in the hawk mask never asks Sarada about the floor plan of the Hokage tower or guard schedule of the walls or the address of the Hokage’s private residence.

Instead, he asks, “Are you hurt?” and “Do you have homework?” and “Is it almost dinnertime?”, as if gently chiding her to go home.

“Are you hungry?” replies Sarada.

“I am well,” says the man in the hawk mask: and perhaps this is why Sarada, suspicious though she is, never asks the proper questions -- how familiar his voice sounds sometimes, like some old memory just beyond her grasp; like the smell of winter, like shadows at dusk, like coming home from outside the walls.  _It’s all right,_  she thinks. 

_(There now. It’s all right.)_

* * *

One time: “How did your parents fall in love?” Sarada asks Chouchou.

“Yuck,” says Chouchou, wrinkling her nose. “I don’t want to think about that. How did mom fall in love with dad? God knows.”

Another time: “How did your parents fall in love?” Sarada asks Boruto.

“Gross,” says Boruto. He thinks for a moment, and says darkly, “My old man probably only loves his charts and requisition forms and tax reports. He’s going to die with them in his office, and be buried with them, and mom will -- mom will be better off. I’ll take better care of her. We’ll open an udon shop. Fuck him.”

“Wow,” says Sarada.

“You drop by whenever, Sarada,” Boruto tells her. “It’ll be on the house for you, always.  _I_  don’t forget my important people.”

Sarada pats him on the shoulder, meager comfort though it is. They have different friend groups at school, and don’t hang out as much as they used -- but Boruto is her earliest friend. They had run around in diapers together. Sarada is wistful for her father sometimes, but she wonders if it’s preferable to the bitter anger Boruto keeps like a burning coal in his heart. But that’s not fair: unhappiness cannot be compared. It can only sympathized.

* * *

The man in the hawk mask is not always at the hickory tree. Sometimes, he is gone for months and months and months. Then, it is just Sarada and the tree and the family of sparrowhawks. Sarada wonders sometimes that the birds return to nest in the same tree year after year -- but they and the man in the hawk mask seem like friends, so perhaps there is nothing to wonder at.

When she was ten, after the man in the hawk mask returned from a particularly long absence, Sarada exclaimed on finding him in the tree branches, “You’re back! When did you get back?”

“Yes,” agreed the man in the hawk mask. He paused, and then said, carefully, “Just now.”

Her mother said that, when returning from the hospital:  _just now, just now, tada ima, I’ve just now come home._ It was habit, more than anything else, to smile and tell him, “Welcome home.”

It was habit; and, having said it, Sarada thought it was probably true, anyway. He helped her with her homework, and listened quietly when she complained, and let her pet his hawks, and reminded her when it time to go home.  _Welcome home_ , she had said. 

She meant it.

**Author's Note:**

> quotes from ‘Chasing Spring’ by Rachel Wetzsteon


End file.
